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Comment by _nalply | Hacker News Reader

It's not coal vs nuclear. Both need to be shut down.

That's not the case at all, nuclear should be how we replace coal. Nuclear is one of the safest way to produce energy today, including the Chernobyl & Fukushima incidents.

Nuclear, because of its energy density, has a big edge against solar and wind as well. AFAIK, building NPPs not only uses less resources and land footprint than wind and solar, they also last longer and are non-intermittent.

In this graph, notice how safe Nuclear is, and also notice that it is cleaner than wind and solar.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

> That's not the case at all, nuclear should be how we replace coal.

I'm going to nit pick

> nuclear should be part of how we replace coal.

There's no energy source that is a "one size fits all." Renewables and storage will better replace coal in some areas and nuclear will better in others. The point is that nuclear is not off the table and that experts can use said tool. It is about not tying peoples' hands behind their backs.

Then perhaps we should start funding fusion research above the "fusion never" levels?

Honestly, had we put the stupid amounts of money that we subsidize fossil fuels with (think about how much government funding went into the specialized drilling that became fracking) into fusion research, we'd likely have it by now.

Fusion is multiple decades ahead of us still, even with more funding, but we need to take action this decade if we want to have an impact on global warming.

Fusion is unfortunately not going to help here.

There will never be one solitary erg of commercially viable energy from Tokamak fusion. Costs are already known to be sky-high, many many times that of e.g. current nuke, which has always been quite a lot more expensive than all the alternatives.

Current government-funded fusion research is a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work. It actually steals all the funding from what could be viable projects.

If we had put the money in renewables we almost certainly would have solved the problems by now.

My dad studied physics in the 60ies when fusion was just 20 years away.

Some Dutch engineers did a lot of pioneering work with wind turbines in the 1970s and nobody took it seriously.

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